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A Half-Gigabyte View of the Moon
An anonymous reader writes "A new 24,000-pixel-square half-gigabyte mosaic from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Moon's nearside as never before. The 1,300 black-and-white frames were acquired during a two-week period in December 2010. There is also video of the half gig moon."
Slashdotted in 3, 2, 1....
http://www.google.com/moon/
Wait... it is a moon.
It can resolve the surface at 2 feet (0.5 m) per pixel — good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots.
Holy crap.
... nothing will.
Correct! We have a winner!
Why is that? Because photos can't be doctored? Seriously, anyone that believes that the moon landings were a hoax will continue to come up with conspiracy theories and claim falsified evidence. There really is no way to argue with or convince them short of flying them up there for a personal look-see, and of course that would never happen. It's not even worth wasting time on them.
Let's wait for the superzoomers to answer that... but I would say it was really unlucky if there isn't any...
Alternative to downloading 500+ MB .tif from overwhelmed server...
Moon
There really is no way to argue with or convince them short of flying them up there for a personal look-see, and of course that would never happen.
Why would that convince them? They'll claim that you flew them to the Arizona desert and are just pretending it's the moon.
...or maybe GoogleMaps craterview would be cool
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Open the window.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Pink Floyd, apparently.
It should be high rez enough to see the leftover junk from the manned landings. If this doesn't shut the moon landing conspiracists up, nothing will.
I appreciate your optimism, but these guys got the backing of a self-proclaimed photographer who doesn't understand how bounce cards work to offer his testimonial. I don't think that group is going anywhere no matter what is found.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
shows the Moon's nearside as never before.
Anyone else misread that as rearside? Time to lay off the porn.
If this doesn't shut the moon landing conspiracists up, nothing will.
All the interesting stuff is on the far side of the moon. Wonder when they'll release those high-resolution photos...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
"good enough to reveal even the paths worn in the lunar soil by the astronauts' boots."
Yeah, right! It's Photoshopped.
-- Boycott Shell
One looks like a deep dry river bed around Archimedes. WTF is that? It's not shallow like the others (I guess lava flows?). Second, I see a short crater rows. I guess this is from a stream of some disintegrated meteor?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
From the article : "The combined image shows slight banding where the 1,024-pixel-wide swaths were stitched together."
BULL! those are where the moon farmers were harvesting their moon wheat! It's all a coverup!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They are not going to show you the masonic lodge and the giant space communications array that the aliens built in 1207. Just give it up. You will have to join and become a master mason in order to even see the photos of it, and become worshipful master before you can go there.
Now I need to go kill myself as I have revealed far too much. My brothers will be here shortly to torch the house... hopefully they torch the right one this time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
All of the Moon landing sites have high res images from LRO.
Heck, they even found the long missing Lunakhod 1, enabling it to be recovered by LLR.
All the interesting stuff is on the far side of the moon. Wonder when they'll release those high-resolution photos...
Like this one ?
They are all available - I would suggest you start by browsing the gallery.
Well, the slashdot effect definitely hit the .tif's site (lroc.sese.asu.edu) for a bit(got to the point where wget lost the connection, and was dial-up speeds before that), but it seems they've mostly recovered! Getting about 2Mbps on the download now.
Wait. These pictures indicate it it is. Sorry, everyone! False alarm.
I'm so embarrassed.
No sig for you!!
I wonder how they compensated the libration in the timeframe they took the images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration
And no, I didn't read TFA.
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
There's sound in space?
One would imagine that the gravity differences would make it clear, too, but they're also welcome to keep walking until they find the walls.
My wife got all excited by this story. She'd always told me that there were pixies on the moon.
I'm going to send an email to everyone I know in Canada
A zooming version is available at zoom.it
Man, they need some mirrors badly. Only getting 500KB/sec.. gonna take forever to download.
Off course you won't be able to see the moon landing site.
Some will tell you is because of resolution.
I say it is because New Mexico is not in the moon.
I can see my house in that picture.
Once I get my grubby paws on the entire mosaic, my copy of Rukl's lunar atlas is going up on Cloudy Nights.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
Any super resolution image for the Earth around?
If this were a JPEG it'd be around 40 MB.
And so much from NASA. Seriously, NASA releases just about everything, while CHina gives just enough to try and make themselves sound nice. Yet, it is a fraction of what they recover. WHy? Because their space program is a MILITARY system, not a civilian one. For you westerners pushing for us to work with China on space, keep in mind that you are helping on weapon systems that will be pointed at us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I really do think that it's amazing what the right hardware in the right place can do for increasing our knowledge. The optics on this spacecraft that generated the data, are no larger than an average webcam at ~1.2mm aperture, F/5 focal ratio described as a telescope (6mm f/5 described as a camera lens). Really impressive dataset.
I can't wait for the Virtual Moon Atlas to have this dataset available..
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
And after all these years I was convinced that the moon was made of blue cheese...
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
According to the NASA article,
the WAC maps nearly the whole Moon every month, in 7 wavelengths
Why do they give us only one?
White isn't a wavelength. They most likely took some or all 7 of the wavelengths and processed them together into this greyscale image.
These sorts of "cameras" don't take normal photographs. They are scientific instruments, and the data has to be heavily processed if they are to be made into useful and appealing images. None of the images from Hubble are how the things it's showing look, they are all false-color, which means the scientists gave each wavelength a color, and processed them together to give a coherent image. This is because the filters (which only allow certain wavelengths to reach the sensor) are not red, green, and blue, like on your digital camera (or cyan, yellow, and magenta, like on your printer), because RGB (or CYM) are not scientifically useful wavelengths. For Hubble, the wavelengths of things like Hydrogen are far more useful. These false-color images work great with something like a nebula, but don't work well at all with the Moon, unless you'd find a psychedelic image of the Moon useful.
If the camera on the orbiter has RGB or CYM, then it's possible to make a full-color image. The regolith on the Moon isn't terribly colorful, so even if it were in color, it would look pretty much like it does now, but at three times the file size. That's assuming the scientists chose to add three primary colors to the set of filters, each of which adds cost, complexity, and weight to the mission.